Had the arc of this presidency followed Barack Obama’s preferred path, the cable channels would have been consumed yesterday by the climate summit in New York. There was a festive lead up to the meeting with tens of thousands of environmental protesters clogging the streets with messages that ranged from the nebulous (Green Jobs) to the acutely specific (Liberate Indigenous Armenian Land from Turkish Conquerors).
The problem for the President, however, was that the news cycle was not dominated by what he wanted to do as President—save the planet. Instead the story was what he had to do—exercise the considerable power of the commander-in-chief by unleashing the terrible force of sophisticated weaponry.
War is a bigger story, and a more important one, than squishy pap about saving Mother Earth. Also, the cable channels would rather replay video of a Tomahawk missile launching from the USS Arleigh Burke than show the President giving a speech.
Secretary of State John Kerry tried to elevate global warming to a threat level on par with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction during a speech Monday opening Climate Week activities in New York. “You can make a powerful argument that it (climate change) may be, in fact, the most serious challenge we face on the planet because it’s about the planet itself.”
That works for hard-core environmentalists, but the louder message came the following morning when the United States Central Command said our forces struck the Khorasan group to thwart an “imminent attack planned against the United States and Western interests.”
Meanwhile, the climate conference is more significant for who is not there. The Wall Street Journal reports President Xi Jinping of China (the world’s top carbon producer) is not in New York. Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India (the third leading carbon emitter) is here, but bypassing the climate meeting.
“What this means is that regardless of what the West does, poorer countries that are reluctant to sign agreements that impede economic progress hold the dominant carbon hand,” the Journal reported. “No matter U.S. exertions to save the planet from atmospheric carbon that may or may not have consequences that may or may not be costly in a century or more, the international result will be more or less the same, though U.S. economic growth will be slower.”
Climate change acolytes have always tried to stress the immediacy of the threat. Act now or all is lost, the science says. Interestingly, science let the air out of one climate balloon. A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a warming trend in the Pacific Northwest, previously attributed to human-generated greenhouse gasses, has actually been caused by naturally occurring changes in winds.
President Obama promised transformative leadership, where intelligent, rational minds dealt with threats without “shock and awe” and shifted attention to new priorities. “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Obama proclaimed when he accepted his party’s nomination in 2008.
A President cannot alter the tides but he can, and is in fact obligated to, “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” which is to say, the country.
We do have our priorities.